About Kate: Truths and One Lie

Her travels started at the age of 11 months, when her ill-advised parents took her and her then six- and nine-year-old brothers on a European tour.

She spent her first sixteen years in Brookline, Massachusetts and another two in Irvington, New York.

She worked as a pastry cook in a dessert restaurant in Boston before deciding that college probably wasn't such a bad idea.

She spent a year as a roadie for Meatloaf before getting her journalistic start covering Italian Beatlemania, archaeological discoveries, and a chocolate festival at the Associated Press bureau in Rome.

She worked as an intern, assistant editor, and research editor for Outside magazine and its special issue, Outside Traveler.

She lived in Italy for a total of nine months, including three working as an exchange worker on organic farms in Sicily, Calabria, and Le Marche.

She has traveled throughout Canada, the U.S., Italy, Norway, Finland, France, England, Dominica, Thailand, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and South Africa.

"Eh" is not her only vestigial Canadianism—both of her parents are from Montreal.

She was a coxswain for the New York Athletic Club and Dartmouth College.

She now resides in Durango, Colorado with a growing pile of used running shoes, five and a half pairs of skis, an impressive collection of tea, and a seven-pound feline that (sometimes) answers to the name of Sophia Maria Lourdes Gato.